You do something to me,
Something that simply mystifies me.

These lines are from Cole Porter’s song “You Do Something to Me,” written for the Broadway musical comedy Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929). In the show’s romantic plot, Porter uses the lyric as a witty, urbane declaration of attraction: the singer can’t rationally explain the beloved’s effect, only register it as a kind of pleasurable bewilderment. The song quickly escaped its theatrical setting and became a popular standard, recorded widely in the early 1930s, helping cement Porter’s reputation for sophisticated love songs that mix conversational directness with playful, slightly surreal imagery.

In these lines, the speaker addresses a lover whose effect is at once undeniable and inexplicable. The plain diction (“You do something to me”) suggests an immediate, bodily or emotional response, while “mystifies” frames attraction as a kind of enchantment that resists rational explanation. The tension between certainty (something is happening) and uncertainty (what it is cannot be named) captures a common Porter theme: sophisticated, witty language used to dramatize the irrational power of desire. The brevity and repetition also mimic the looping insistence of infatuation—an experience felt more than understood.